


(Your Name) It Catches In My Throat

by Oriki-Miitad (Sneaking_UnicornWitch)



Series: Onomastics [The Study of Names] [3]
Category: Star Wars: The Clone Wars (2008) - All Media Types
Genre: Death, Decommissioning Mention, Definitely feels, Gen, Kamino Was Awful, Mandalorian Culture, No Beta We Die Like Clones, Not Onscreen, Rako Hardeen Arc Mention, clone culture, kinda angsty, tenses are hard
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-31
Updated: 2020-08-31
Packaged: 2021-03-06 23:21:21
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 673
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26217058
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sneaking_UnicornWitch/pseuds/Oriki-Miitad
Summary: Cody had been just about to go through his second growth cycle when he had carved the first name of his physical remembrances.It's not the last time.(Cody introspects about his own name)
Series: Onomastics [The Study of Names] [3]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1888222
Comments: 4
Kudos: 53





	(Your Name) It Catches In My Throat

**Author's Note:**

> In case it’s not immediately obvious, the fics in this series are not all necessarily set in the same universe...

Cody had been just about to go through his second growth cycle when he had carved the first name of his physical remembrances.

Not that he had known that was what it could be called at the time. That came later, Alpha-17 passing on the culture he’d in turn been taught, the daily reminder of those who had already marched far away. Cody had learned mando’a, with the history and traditions seeping into the fibre of his being. 

But until then, he’d made his own. 

Flak had simply been missing when his batch woke up one morning, with no mention from the Kaminiise or trainers where he’d gone. Cody knew better than to ask questions about it, only sharing a confused look with his batchmates as they got dressed and it became clear that all of Flak’s few belongings had also been taken away in the night. Flak wasn’t the first vod of Cody’s acquaintance that had gone ‘missing’, but he had been the closest. That evening there’d been another clone climbing up into Flak’s bunk. It was his bunk now, Cody supposed. 

And yet it had just seemed so wrong for there to be no record of his brother, nothing to commemorate the place he’d held in Cody’s life. So, he’d flipped up his mattress, and used a multitensil (the one from the mess that he’s  _ pretty  _ sure Gilamar saw on his last inspection but chose to say nothing about) to score the angular lines of Flak’s name into the slat farthest from the pod opening. 

It was as he had been working on working the etching deeper into the ‘plast on that first name that he had realised how little time it had taken him. All the hard lines and sharp corners of  _ FLAK _ had made it too easy. 

He’d realised that  _ KOTE _ was only marginally more difficult to write. That if any one of his brothers chose to memorialise his loss, death, absence in the same way it would be over too fast. Too easy.

But he wasn’t going down without a fight, and his name won’t either. He wanted a name that would get stuck, curved edges almost all the way through. He was used to jagged, barbed, sharp-cornered danger. He’d not realised a meandering loop could be a source of hazard. It might even be poetic.

Even though it had been a name he’d worn with honour, like armour one day he  _ will _ fill, ever since Prime had bestowed it upon him in the sims, he’d decided he needed a new name. 

And so, when they had woken up the next day and made their introductions to this new  ~~ not-Flak ~~ vod over firstmeal, he had said, “My name is  **Cody** .”

################################################################################

Many more names followed Flak’s while they went through training on Kamino. Cody’d moved through so many different pods and barrack rooms, always leaving the same physical trace of the vode he kept eternally in his memory. Sometimes he liked to imagine a second cycle vod’ika lifting up his old mattress, reading the names of Flak and the others, saying a remembrance for them. It’s not the kind of thing he thinks is meant to be comforting, but it is - in its own strange way. 

After the first battle it had taken him weeks to carve the names, uselessly stuck back on Kamino while his vode had died on Geonosis. 

And then he is the Commander, in the role he was literally born to fill. On the  _ Negotiator  _ he doesn’t have the bulkhead space to memorialise the names of all those who march away while under his command. He doesn’t imagine the nat-borns would be impressed if the structural integrity was impacted by his carvings. Instead he keeps it to the names of Ghost Company, and is thankful that the times he has to use his blade on the duralloy are few and far between. 

There’s one name he can’t imagine having to carve, all the way up until he’s actually doing so. 

But then Obi-Wan comes back. 

**Author's Note:**

> I'm on tumblr [here](https://oriki-miitad.tumblr.com/), come say hi!
> 
> Edited A/N: well, guess which di'kut forgot Aurebesh existed... *Slowly raises hand*  
> This doesn't work quite as well as planned!   
> Imagine it's in 'our' Latin alphabet, folx.


End file.
